Overheard at the water cooler in regards to Warhammer Online, "EA is going to shut it down later this year I know that for a fact, the entire team is being retasked and the dead weight is being laid off, GW is quietly taking the license to a new company I have it on good authority that THQ will get that as well as they are working on a yet unannounced WHF RTS similar to Dawn of War. But don't expect it till 2015 way after the fail of WAR has been forgotten. And no links no way to prove any of this I just know folks at GW who like to talk after a couple pints."
Yeah I know...people say all kinds of things on the internet, and this one is a bit hard to believe. But something is definitely going on over at Mythic as I posted before. Still though, shut down completely? While not necessarily a reliable source, MMO Data thinks Warhammer has around 125,000 subs. Definitely not close to the million they were expecting, but other MMO's have been running for years with less than that. But then again, there's word of merging their existing US servers into one, which would indicate a much smaller subscriber number.
The fellow above linked a blog article which seems to be his own regarding what Warhammer was initially intended to be like and eventually ended up as. I thought was a pretty good read which I wanted to share. His final paragraph summed up much of my own thoughts of why I've not been enjoying the latest batch of MMO offerings:
"I also hope that one day they will sit down and look at the train wreck they helped create in a realistic way, and that EA will understand that you can not have a subscription based MMO that is basically Halo with swords, that you need to appeal to a broad base, of players PVPers, Crafters PVE players and socializers, etc. the companies that got it right and are successful (as in will still be here in five years) understand that, the companies that don’t produce harebrained catch phrases, and pour zippo fluid on a game that is already burning…. I think the last nail in the Warhammer Coffin is when at the Febuary Baltimore Gamesday Erik Mogensen more or less apologized for the game, and assured people that would never happen to another Games Workshop License again, he seemed more than a little agitated as he spoke those words..."
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3 comments:
The most annoying part of the whole WAR fiasco was the utter lack of humility both pre-launch, with the hype machine powered by the talking head of Paul Barnett, and post launch. The 'Producers Letters' were full of 'omg you should be so excited about what we have coming up!!!!!', whereas the players just wanted honest up front talk about when the multiple issues keeping the game from being really good would be addressed.
And how Paul Barnett is still employed amazes me. He hasn't proven to have any game dev related skills, although he would make a good blogger.
I'm not sure how many subs are needed for EA to keep a MMO going. I believe Sims online had in the neighborhood of 100K subs when they shut the doors on it. Motor City online really tanked, I doubt it had even 40K subs when they shut it down.
Of course the counterexample is UO, which they have kept up and running on life support for years.
I expect that WAR and DAoC will be kept on life support as long as they are bringing in more than it costs to run the servers. Don't expect any substantive updates to either, however.
Mythic seems to be dying a protracted death. Which sucks, because DAoC is the overall best of the olden MMOs imo.
When Mythic was just small Mythic, I guess small subscriptions like DAOC were affordable. Maybe not so much under the EA umbrella. Or maybe they're just insistent on those million subscribers they were expecting for WAR and now SW:TOR.
Yeah it does suck. So much more could have been done with DAOC.
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